Is Gentrification All Bad? Justin Davidson Answers His Critics

In an article that appeared in the February 2 issue of New York Magazine, I wondered whether gentrification is really the toxic cloud it’s usually made out to be. Focusing on a small business in Inwood, a community organization in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and an affordable housing development for artists in East Harlem, I argued that efforts to improve a neighborhood from inside and the arrival of new, more affluent residents from outside are two aspects of the same process. “Gentrification can be either a toxin or a balm,” I wrote. “There’s the fast-moving, invasive variety nourished by ever-rising prices per square foot; then there’s a more natural, humane kind that takes decades to mature and lives on a diet of optimism and localpride.”

That article, and a subsequent discussion on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, triggered scattered gusts of commentary that whipped aroundlocalwebsites, Facebook, and Twitter. Much of the reaction was positive, some of it outraged. The most incisive zeroed in on points that I couldn’t fully address in the print magazine’s limited space. So now I’ve returned to the topic and tried to distill the splatter of posts, tweets, and comments into an imaginary dialogue with a skepticalreader:

Only if you define them as synonyms. Gentrification is the process in which new residents move into a neighborhood, raising income levels. One place that’s happening without displacement is Hunters Point South, where large residential towers with a lot of affordable housing are rising on abandoned industrialland.

You’re just advocating the trickle-down, rising-tide-lifts-all-boats theory that has created massiveinequality.

Not at all. Many of the improvements to struggling neighborhoods have come from local, grass-roots activists wielding political clout to get stuff done. To consolidate those gains and to spread their benefits equitably, we need a more powerful set of tools to create affordablehousing:

A much wider network of supportive housing, so that the chronic homeless don’t spend years in “temporary” emergencyshelters

Businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods are affected too. New zoning on the Upper West Side limits the size of new storefronts and tightens restrictions on banks; it’s worth exploring whether that experiment can be replicated in other parts of thecity.

You’re minimizing the suffering of people who get forced out of places they have lived for decades. Don’t you believe people have a right to stay where theyare?

I do, but it’s not an absolute right. The only way to guarantee it would be to pass new universal, citywide rent control legislation — a move that, politically, is in the realm of fantasyland. On the other hand, dysfunctional cities and neighborhoods force people to stay where they are: That’s the definition of aghetto.

You hint that the gentrification is the only force preventing urban decay. But New York’s not about to go the way of Detroit just because a few new luxury condos don’t getbuilt.

Of course not, but the danger of renewed urban decline does continue to lurk. Many cities around the country are suffering the opposite problems from ours, and there is no guarantee that the gains New York has made in restoring its economy, keeping crime down and providing services won’t be reversed. Gentrification isn’t just a byproduct of prosperity; it’s part of theengine.

Astute, but overstated. The plutocrats snapping up duplexes a quarter mile above 57th Street aren’t the same people driving up prices inBushwick.

No matter what you say, you can’t get around the fact that the most vulnerable people in New York are those (largely African-American and Latino) who live in unregulated housing, have no protection from eviction, and no clear path to economic stability. Gentrification can destroy theirlives.

That is totally true — which is why we need to support Mayor de Blasio’s ambitious affordable-housing goals and hope that he has the capacity to achieve them. But subsidies won’t solve the worst kinds of inequality, preserve the middle class, or relieve pressure on the poor. New York needs policies that will stimulate the construction of large amounts of new unsubsidized housing in neighborhoods that are unlikely to become “hot,” especially in Queens. There is enough land to do this, if only the forces of NIMBY could be tamed. In the 1940s, developers put up middle class housing in every borough, and there should be ways to make that happen again. I have some limited hope in the possibilities of modular construction to lower building costs, but that’s certainly not acure-all.

Rich liberals love to talk about socioeconomic diversity so long as they’re the ones doing the diversifying. But when homeless shelters start coming into their neighborhoods, suddenly they’re worried about propertyvalues.

Socioeconomic and ethnic diversity is a civic virtue in high-income neighborhoods just as much as in low-income neighborhoods. The housing projects that now find themselves in wealthy areas predated gentrification of course, but they do have the welcome, if unintended, effect of maintaining significant populations of low-income residents in high-incomeareas.

That doesn’t mean the Upper West Side needs to accept a spate of poorly run “emergency” shelters for which the city pays preposterously high rent. But if a responsible nonprofit organization opened a well-managed supportive housing building similar to Common Ground’s The Hegeman in Brownsville, it would fit rightin.

What about a neighborhood’s character? Are you willing to see that geterased?

This gets us to a fundamental philosophical point: I believe that nobody owns a neighborhood or gets to control its character, and nobody has a moral right to make others feel like they don’t belong. That principle is what makes New York great. New arrivals can become New Yorkers in an instant, simply by being here. Telling people they are not welcome in some part of the city because of who they are, how much they earn, or what language they speak is wrong, regardless of the circumstances. That same territorial sense of protectiveness kicks in when nations protect their culture through hostility to immigrants, institutions discriminate by invoking their history, and communities try to maintainsegregation.

Character evolves naturally, and it dissipates the same way, through a combination of pressure and economic success. Jewish neighborhoods became less Jewish, Italian neighborhoods less Italian, Dominican neighborhoods less Dominican, poor neighborhoods less poor, and, yes, rich neighborhoods less rich. This happens partly because other groups move in, and partly because second and third generation immigrants disperse, making way for new populations who will eventually regret the erosion of “their” neighborhoods,too.

As we anticipate the end of Mueller, signs of a wind-down:-SCO prosecutors bringing family into the office for visits-Staff carrying out boxes-Manafort sentenced, top prosecutor leaving-office of 16 attys down to 10-DC US Atty stepping up in cases-grand jury not seen in 2mo

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them. Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again.

… Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy.

Attorneys for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and more than a dozen other defendants charged in a Florida prostitution sting filed a motion to stop the public release of surveillance videos and other evidence taken by police.

Attorneys filed the motion Wednesday in Palm Beach County court. The State of Florida does not agree with the request, according to the filing.

In the motion, the attorneys asked the court to grant a protective order to safeguard the confidentiality of the materials seized from the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, and “in particular the videos, until further order of the court.”

Two years in, White House aides are dismayed to discover the president likes lobbing pointless, nasty attacks at people like George Conway and John McCain

But the saga has left even White House aides accustomed to a president who bucks convention feeling uncomfortable. While the controversies may have pushed aside some bad news, they also trampled on Trump’s Wednesday visit to an army tank manufacturing plant in swing state Ohio.

“For the most part, most people internally don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” said one former senior White House official. A current senior White House official said White House aides are making an effort “not to discuss it in polite company.” Another current White House official bemoaned the tawdry distraction. “It does not appear to be a great use of our time to talk about George Conway or dead John McCain. … Why are we doing this?

When Mr. Trump was running for president, he promised to personally stop American companies from shutting down factories and moving plants abroad, warning that he would punish them with public backlash and higher taxes. Many companies scrambled to respond to his Twitter attacks, announcing jobs and investments in the United States — several of which never materialized.

But despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel companies to build and hire, they appear to be increasingly prioritizing their balance sheets over political backlash.

“I don’t think there’s as much fear,” said Gene Grabowski, who specializes in crisis communications for the public relations firm Kglobal. “At first it was a shock to the system, but now we’ve all adjusted. We take it in stride, and I think that’s what the business community is doing.”

There’s no specific stipulation that Milo must be heard, so it could be worse

President Trump is expected to issue an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to tie research and education grants made to colleges and universities to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment, according to a draft of the order viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The order instructs agencies including the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Defense to ensure that public educational institutions comply with the First Amendment, and that private institutions live up to their own stated free-speech standards.

The order falls short of what some university officials feared would be more sweeping or specific measures; it doesn’t prescribe any specific penalty that would result in schools losing research or other education grants as a result of specific policies.

Tech companies say that it is easier to identify content related to known foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al Qaeda because of information-sharing with law enforcement and industry-wide efforts, such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a group formed by YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter in 2017.

On Monday, for example, YouTube said on its Twitter account that it was harder for the company to stop the video of the shootings in Christchurch than to remove copyrighted content or ISIS-related content because YouTube’s tools for content moderation rely on “reference files to work effectively.” Movie studios and record labels provide reference files in advance and, “many violent extremist groups, like ISIS, use common footage and imagery,” YouTube wrote.

The cycle is self-reinforcing: The companies collect more data on what ISIS content looks like based on law enforcement’s myopic and under-inclusive views, and then this skewed data is fed to surveillance systems, Bloch-Wehba says. Meanwhile, consumers don’t have enough visibility in the process to know whether these tools are proportionate to the threat, whether they filter too much content, or whether they discriminate against certain groups, she says.

Two mystery litigants citing privacy concerns are making a last-ditch bid to keep secret some details in a lawsuit stemming from wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s history of paying underage girls for sex.

Just prior to a court-imposed deadline Tuesday, two anonymous individuals surfaced to object to the unsealing of a key lower-court ruling in the case, as well as various submissions by the parties.

Both people filed their complaints in the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which is overseeing the case. The two people said they could face unwarranted speculation and embarrassment if the court makes public records from the suit, in which Virginia Giuffre, an alleged Epstein victim, accused longtime Epstein friend Ghislaine Maxwell of engaging in sex trafficking by facilitating his sexual encounters with teenage girls. Maxwell has denied the charges.

Rescue teams in Mozambique are struggling to reach the thousands of people stranded on roofs and in trees and urgently need more helicopters and boats as post-cyclone flood waters continue to rise.

Rescue workers, military personnel and volunteers are rushing to save thousands of Mozambicans before flood levels rise further, but with four helicopters, a handful of boats and extremely difficult conditions, have only been able to save about 413 so far.

“I don’t even know if we’ve made a dent. There are just so many people. The scale is huge. We’re busy doing the best we can,” said Travis Trower from Rescue South Africa, adding that a lot of people had been washed away but those still alive, whom he had seen from helicopter flights, were in a very bad state.

More than 400 sq kilometres (150 sq miles) in the region are flooded, according to satellite images taken by the EU, and in some places the water is six metres (19ft) deep. At least 600,000 people are affected, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), ranging from those whose lives are in immediate danger to those who need other kinds of aid.

About 40 percent of the District’s lower-income neighborhoods experienced gentrification between 2000 and 2013, giving the city the greatest “intensity of gentrification” of any in the country, according to a studyreleased Tuesday by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

The District also saw the most African American residents — more than 20,000 — displaced from their neighborhoods during that time, mostly by affluent, white newcomers, researchers said. The District and Philadelphia were most “notable” for displacements of black residents, while Denver and Austin had the most Hispanic residents move. Nationwide, nearly 111,000 African Americans and more than 24,000 Hispanics moved out of gentrifying neighborhoods, the study found.

In an essay accompanying the study, Sabiyha Prince of Empower DC said the city “rolled out the proverbial red carpet” for tens of thousands of new residents in the past five years. But the new dog parks, bike lanes, condominiums and pricey restaurants that followed, she said, are not viewed as improvements by long-term residents, who can feel isolated because of losing neighbors, social networks and local businesses. Prince, an anthropologist, said longtime Washingtonians tell stories of “alienation and vulnerability in the nation’s capital.”